PURACÉ: WEAK AND STRONG MEN IN NIETZSCHE

Jorge E. Arboleda

Introduction.
The main purpose of this paper is to explore Nietzsche's conception of weak and strong
men and the conciliation between both characteristics. To develop this idea I’m taking a
case of my personal experience and comparing it with some parts of Nietzsche’s writings.
The paper is divided in four main parts: I ethnographic setting, II weak men in Nietzsche,
III strong men in Nietzsche, and IV Conciliation between weakness and strength
One of the crucial questions to begin is the one Loui Picceli, a classmate in Professor
Berman’s class brought to our weekly meeting: Would Nietzsche prefer men like some
criminals today that are prisoners in Rilkers Island, over the "normal" and respectable
citizens we live with? This question led me to a new one: what makes men considered
dangerous and in need of being kept out of society? Is it enough just classify them as
“bad” men or is there any alternative way of defining their role in society?
My decision to explore weakness in Nietzsche came after reading some of his texts in
which he claims to differentiate between two kinds of men: the “little men” and the
“higher men”
I. THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SETTING
In 1991 I worked as a researcher for a mining company in the southwestern Andes of
Colombia. At first, I got in touch with the company because they funded the research I
was doing towards getting my degree in anthropology. Then, as soon as I graduated they
contracted me a researcher with the task of writing a biography of the founder of the
mine. At that time, the job seemed like a prize. I was contracted to develop my learning
just two months after I graduated, Great! That doesn’t happen very often to Colombian
graduates.
The case.
On September 17, 1990, the inhabitants of the town of Purace were surprised by a new
fire in the sulfur mine "El Vinagre", located on the slopes of the Purace volcano. This fire
was the sixth in the last ten years. The fire caused major problems in the economic life of
the Puracenos because most of them worked in the mine.
 The fire burned for 66 days. It destroyed most of the mine and expelled sulfuric
gases around the area. It burned the vegetation and many of the cattle, birds and rodents
died. Many of the Puracenos required medical attention for respiratory ailments. The
mining company lost approximately 200,000 dollars.
On September 17, Industrias Purace S.A., the mining company, called an
emergency meeting to plan the best way to help the people and to avoid any further
damages, and panic. They had many ideas regarding the accident. The most important
decisions made were to install temporary health centers, to print brochures about disaster
prevention, and to distribute anti-gas masks, etc.
I participated in the meeting, and afterwards, the president of the company asked
my opinion on how to avoid panic in the region. Based on my experience with the
Puracenos and my knowledge of their traditions and rituals I answered: "When the
volcano is angered it is necessary to bring San Miguel, the local religious patron, in
procession." My proposal was to hold the annual San Miguel's procession before the
traditional date of September 27th. My suggestion was based on the Puraceno's beliefs
that "San Miguel could calm the volcano's anger because he had proven to be the only
one capable of that, in past fires."
My comments were received very skeptically at the meeting. It was impossible for
Industrias Purace management to think that San Miguel's procession would calm down
the fire's anger.
On September 19, while the non-Indian employees were working on this plan, the
local Workers Union had a meeting with the company's president and directors. To the
management's surprise the Union's directors demanded an earlier San Miguel's procession
as a measure to calm down the fire. The board of directors accepted the union's demand.
On September 20th the procession was held and stretched for 15 miles long, from the
town of Purace to the mine. The fire calmed down one week later.
Four months later, in January 1991, the same president of the company offered me
a contract to write the biography of his father. As I wrote early, I thought that was a great
prize for a graduate Colombian. I was thinking the family who owned the mine would be
really happy about the sketches I wrote about the founder.
I started attending to the meetings of the board of executives of the company,

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received a couple good comments from the members and drank liters of coffee. The most
interested person in the project seemed to be one of the daughters of Manuel Maria
Mosquera-Wallis, the founder. From the beginning she took me to the house of her 100-
year-old uncle where a giant family archive was available for my research.
Later on, when my research in the archives was close to ending, the daughter
became more confident with me and, in a very subtle way asked me to write a biography
in which her father would be shown very different from what I found in my initial
research. I tried to be sensitive to her requests, but in the end what I wrote didn't
correspond with her desires. The company responded as I expected: they did not publish
the book.
The Puracenos are now Spanish-speakers, but they were Purace-Coconuco-
speakers until the first half of this century. The cultural spaces in the Puracenos life are
governed by an Andean basic rule: the relation between "Hot" and "Cold." Their human
behavior and their social relations are divided between hot and cold; there are people
whose "blood" is hot or cold. The best for the Puracenos is to be in the middle; it avoids
passion, violence, and non-desirable behaviors. Houses are also built with materials that
have hot-cold properties: the foundations are made in stone, a cold material; the walls and
the roof are made in adobe and straw, both hot materials. In their economy the main
source of commerce is sulfur. It comes from the coldest place in Purace: outside the
volcano, but it also comes from the hottest place there: inside the volcano.
In their spiritual culture world is governed by creatures from both environments,
hot and cold. The devil, the main spiritual creature, is the hottest. He lives inside the
volcano where he has his "balcony home." "The Widow" or "the Mountaineer Hunter"
are spiritual forms whose domains are in the coldest places and times: the paramo and the
night.
Medicine (a part of their spiritual life) is also governed by hot-cold relation too. To
treat cold diseases is necessary to use hot plants. To treat hot diseases is necessary to use
cold plants. E.g. the "susto" ("scare") or the "mal Viento" ("bad-wind"), a cold disease, is
necessary to treat with "yacuma", a hot plant available in the Paramo, the coldest place.
High fever is treated with cold plants as "colecaballo" or "coca", etc.
The beginnings of the mine.

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An indigenous man of the region told me this account of the discovery of the mine:
"Near the San Juan hot springs Manuel smelled sulfur. He walked for a long time,
following the smell, until he discovered the first sulfur deposits in these thermals. The
sulfur was brought to Purace, where Manuel put it in an oven and discovered the high
quality of the sulfur."
"Manuel and five men explored the area. They started at San Juan thermals,
continued to "Paramo Chiquito", until they got to the "Alfombrado". Manuel carefully
examined all the sulfur deposits, but he didn't find the sulfur quality that he needed. At
the end of the journey, he was tired and without hope. He became separated from the
group and walked around the volcano slopes looking for flowers and animals."
"As Manuel was walking in the "Alfombrado" a strange man approached him. The
man told Manuel that he would show him where the sulfur was, so that Manuel could
open a sulfur mine, if Manuel would repay him with the souls of future laborers. Manuel
didn't believe him because he had already searched without any luck. However, Manuel
accepted the man's proposal because he had not explored the other side of the volcano for
fear of wild animals."
"The man asked Manuel to point his rifle at the wall of rocks. Manuel shot the rifle
and where bullets hit the rocks, sulfur immediately flowed. Then, the man told Manuel
that this was the exact place to build the mine. This is the actual mine site today."
"The man who appeared to Manuel was the devil. To start the mine activities
Manuel had to sign a pact with the devil."
"To open the mine the workers started to excavate the rocks until they discovered fire and
sulfur. From those location Manuel took the first amount of sulfur for industrial use."

"That sulfur was "cooked" in "pots" for the first time at Carlos Orozco's home. They used
wood fired ovens. Later Manuel installed a "glass-oven" at Rosa Roja's home in
"Chichiguara". Later they transported the "glass oven" to the "Compartidero." The sulfur
was carried on their backs, and later by mules."
"Many people worked at the oven. Some people broke the sulfur rocks, others shopped
firewood, and some carried the sulfur on their backs. Men, women, and children worked
there."

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"Due to the difficulty of transporting the sulfur on people’s backs, Manuel built a road to
the mine and moved the ovens there."
“Manuel was a strong worker. He did not have to eat much in order to work hard at the
mine. He was a poor man and he had many debts when he started working in the mine.
To be able to pay off his debts, and to develop his mine projects, Manuel sold his soul
and his employee's souls to the devil."
My encounter with Mosquera
After hearing this narration about the mine and its founder, it seemed that I was dealing
with two different views. On one hand I had the indigenous narrative and on the other the
story Mosquera's family wanted me to tell to the people outside Purace. For the family,
and also for the “middle class” and normal citizens of Colombia’s Cauca Valley, this
sinister and enigmatic entrepreneur was nothing different than a hero, “an innovator” his
old employees said.
For me there it was clear that the views of the indigenous and the people from the
cities and the Mosquera family did not agree. The former thought their hero was a
remarkable man, meanwhile the indigenous thought this was a man that was able to deal
with the devil. They acknowledged that his greatness was based not just on his ability to
develop an economic emporium but also in his capacity to deal with evil. Indigenous did
not want to be carried to hell in the hands of Mosquera but neither did they want to be
exposed to poverty and malnutrition. Was Mosquera just a cruel man that made his
fortune from indigenous blood? Or were the indigenous those poor and pity creatures that
Nietzsche defines when he refers to the German peasants of his time? These last two
questions guide my inquiries on Nietzsche’s conception of weak and strong men.
II. WEAK MEN IN NIETZSCHE
In his writings, Nietzsche talks about men being weak and refers to many different
situations in which men don't have enough strength to develop ideas or enough facts to
make him free. Faith in Nietzsche is synonym of weakness and freedom a synonym of
strength. “The need for faith, for some kind of unconditional Yes and No (…) is a need
born of weakness” (The antichrist: 638)
Because of his personal experience as a German, Nietzsche takes some of his
ethnographical information from his own people. He takes their "stupidity" as weakness,

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as an impediment to freeing their spirit: "this people has deliberately made itself stupid,
for nearly a millenium nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and
Christianity, been abused more dissolutely. Recently even a third had been added -one
that alone would be sufficient to dispatch all fine and bold flexibility of the spirit- music,
our constipated, constipating German music" (Twilight of the Idols: 507).

Looking at what Nietzsche tells about the German peasants, there would not be much
difference between this definition and Mosquera’s conception of the indigenous he dealt
with. “these indians are nothing else but drunk, their underdeveloped mind is full of
aguardiente y coca. They are poor creatures whose main goal is to live like Guinea pigs:
eating and fornicating without stop”. Mosquera never emulated Nietzsche; he was not
interested in philosophical thinking, he was more a character proper of Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness: a western civilized man lost in the deep of the Andes. Like Kurtz, getting the
ivory that in this case was nothing other than sulfur.
Weakness in Nietzsche's view (and in his "German" observations) is founded in
alcohol, music and Christianity. I'll take the latter one to develop his view of how
Christianity has a remarkable role in building the origins and the development of the
weak men he sees at the end of the 1800s.
Origins of weakness.
Christianity as founded by Christ and his army of poor people is thought by Nietzsche as
a religion of pities: "think of the tremendous fuss these pious little people make over their
little trespasses! Who cares? Certainly God least of all. In the end all these pity
provincials even demand the crown of eternal life (…) just imagine an immortal Peter!…
these little men are fired with the most ridiculous of ambition: chewing the cud of their
private grievances and misfortunes" (Genealogy of morals: 282).
For Nietzsche, in this case, Christianity was originated by the poor whose only
weapon to support each other was weakness and poverty. Segregated, these poor men
only could follow the teachings of that "Jew" whose ideas were to redeem the poor to
empower themselves, not even against Greek thought and Roman government but against
the idea of polytheism and the Greek gods and the Roman conception of religion. That
rupture with the Old Testament seems to be an upheaval against the Gold of the rich

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ancient religion. The metaphoric Golden Calf and the hate pushed by the New Testament
against the Old Testament it's nothing but a collection of grievances from the poor. His
monotheism comes from the idea of its own sectarianism where there is no space for
others beside the poor: "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than
for a rich men go to heaven". Nietzsche says on behalf of his belief: “Christianity was not
a function of race –it turned to every kind of men who was disinherited by life, it has its
allies everywhere. At the bottom of Chrisitianity is the rancor of the sick, instinct directed
against the healthy, against health itself” (cited by W. Kauffman in the portable
Nietzsche: The antichrist”, p. 567).
Now I remember the procession the Puracenos organized to pray to their San
Miguel. “That little people” carrying the image of that Saint of poor inspiration. That
poor Saint Michael again fighting darkness in the slopes of the volcano. The army of the
poor against fire, the same army of the mine’s workers union fighting the power of the
rich and dominant Mosqueras. Is not their faith the weakness brought by Nietzsche?
How weakness is developed in men
To Nietzsche, western men had developed weakness because of its connection to
Christianity. Christians as understood by Nietzsche had been since its beginning a
religion of the weak, the poor and the sick. And just because of that, Christianity
developed its power mounted over the shoulders of the poor, that “mob” that he dislikes;
that mob that lead the west to the monotheism and its sectarianism: one God, one truth,
one faith.
Nietzsche conceives the sectarianism of Christians as the denial of accepting other
ways of thinking and other Gods of faith. There are no different ways to communicate
with God other than the way chosen by the first Christians: by their suffering and
poverty. That gives origin to what Nietzsche calls as the "ascetic ideal". “In short theirs
is the serene asceticism of a divinely winged animal that soars above life but does not
alight on it. We all know the three mighty slogans of the ascetic ideal: poverty, humility
and chastity, and when we examine the lives of the great productive spirits closely, we
are bound to find all three present in some degree” (Genealogy of morals: 243). Such
ideal is then based in the conception of just one way to know the truth, just one faith. In
this sense Nietzsche redeems the Greek by putting them away from that “just one truth”.

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Since Greek religion is not monotheist it doesn't lie on an "absolute value of truth"
(Genealogy of Morals: 288), circumstance that makes it far from the ascetic ideal
invented by Christianity
Christianity as based on the truth that salvation comes from poverty and suffering,
and pushes the idea that a good Christian must be convinced of asceticism. Nietzsche
rejects the idea of asceticism in the sense that his redemption of Greek religion makes
him think that human nature does not correspond with “ true” in which men are only
rational and “human”. “A single look at the Greek gods will convince us that a belief in
gods need not result in morbid imaginations, that there are nobler ways of creating divine
figments –ways which don’t lead to the kind of self-crucifixion and self punishment in
which Europe, for millennia now, has excelled. The Hellenic gods reflected a race of
noble and proud beings, in whom man’s animal self have divine status and hence no need
to lacerate and rage against itself” (Genealogy of Morals: 227)
In the same way Nietzsche recognizes that there had been different attempts in
which Western civilization tried to redeem the idea of conciliating “animal” and “human”
men. Writing on Luther: “He wanted to be able to speak directly in his own voice,
“informally” with his God… well that’s what he did. –Obviously the ascetic ideal was at
no time a school of good taste, much less of good manners” (Genealogy of Morals: 283).
However these attempts had been insufficient to fight the weakness men had carried since
Plato decided to break with Homer, and since Christians adopted Plato’s thoughts as their
own. “Plato vs. Homer: here we have the authentic antagonism; in one hand the
deliberate transcendentalist and the detractor of life, on the other, life’s instinctive
panegyrist” (Genealogy of Morals: 290).
Effects of weakness in men.
Nietzsche doesn’t criticize Christianity because of its apology of poverty and weakness
but also because the cruelty generated by the hypocrisy implicit in the sectarianism and in
the resentment caused by the feeling of vengeance developed since the beginnings of
Christianity. “The idea of vengeance leads us (…) to our original problem: how can the
infliction of pain provide satisfaction? The delicacy –even more, the tartufferie- of
domestic animals like ourselves shrinks from imagining clearly to what extent cruelty
constituted the collective delight of older mankind, how much it was an ingredient of all

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their joys, or how naively their manifested their cruelty, how they considered
disinterested malevolence (Spinoza’s symphatia malevolens) a normal trait, something to
which one’s conscience could assent heartily” (Genealogy of morals: 198).
That hypocrisy of cruelty generated by the ascetic ideal, by the pity power of the
weak and their Christian faith, calls Nietzsche’s attention and led him to extract from
Don Quixote: “to behold suffering gives pleasure, but to cause another to suffer affords
an even greater pleasure” (ibid.). At this point, Nietzsche develops deeply the idea that
there is not any good in weak men since its weakness is not just originated in hate and
vengeance but also developed on cruelty and “production” of suffering. Since that, he
writes: “it should be clearly understood that in the days when people were unashamed of
their cruelty life was a great deal more enjoyable than it is know in the heyday of
pessimism” (Genealogy of Morals: 199).
The weakness of the Puracenos would be based on their faith but also their faith
would be their bastion to escape from the devil. Their humility brings them to think that
they are not candidates to be carried by Mosquera to hell. They are happy seeing how
their alcoholic, and poor, life saves them from fire while Mosquera just takes the lives of
a few of them to give them to the devil. Cruelty in the indigenous is hidden under their
humble and slight laugh. They just smile while some of their brothers are carried to hell.
III. STRONG MEN IN NIETZSCHE.
Nietzsche’s radical rupture with Christianity brings him to think that a good start for
strong men should be their own rupture with Christian morality. Since “the Christian
church has left nothing untouched by its corruption” (the antichrist: 655), strength needs
to be forged under the purpose of establishing a radical rupture with every sign of
Christianity in men’s thought. Men needs to born again to fight his own weakness.

How strength is developed

Men’s rupture with weakness should lead him to reevaluate all foundations of its own
moral: “we ourselves, we free spirits, are nothing less than a revaluation of all values, an
incarnate declaration of war and triumph over all that ancient conceptions of “true” and
“untrue” (The Antichrist: 579). To develop this revaluation Nietzsche urges men to be

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skeptic as the main, and first step to build strength: “great spirits are skeptics. Zarathustra
is a skeptic. Strength, freedom which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit,
proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in
fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons” (The antichrist:
639).
Since Western men had grown up in states forged under the sight of Christian
faith, they need to break with that parochial state: “Escape form the bad smell!!! Escape
from idolatry of the superfluous/ (…) escape from the steam of these human sacrifices!
The earth is free even now for great souls. There are still many empty seats for the
lonesome and the twosome, fanned by the fragrance of silent seas/ A free life is still free
for great souls. Verily whoever possesses little is possessed that much less: praised be a
little poverty!/ only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not
superfluous; there begins the song of necessity, the unique and inimitable tune” (Thus
Spoke Zarathustra: 163)
Then, when men, by his rupture with his morals and his “state”, had advanced in
his purpose to reach the necessary strength for freedom, his spirit could be facing the
same steps taken by criminals and outlaws. A rupture with the state of pities implies
killing “ and as you kill, be sure that you yourselves justify life!/ It is not enough to make
your peace with the man you kill. Your sadness shall be love of the overman: thus you
shall justify your living on” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: 150).
At this point transgression had brought strong men to be considered evil in the
view of the weak men who he is fighting. But this should not defeat the strong “man must
become better and more evil (…) The greatest evil is necessary for the overman’s best. It
may have been good for that preacher of the little (weak) people that he suffered and tried
to bear man’s sin. But I rejoice over great sin as my great consolation” (thus spoke
Zarathustra: 400). This evil brings men to solitude, the solitude of its greatness, a space
not made for setting it back. Once men had gotten here, it is impossible to avoid creation.
Creation came with egoism. “you creators, you higher men! Whoever has to give birth
(creation) is sick; but whoever has given birth is unclean” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: 403).
Solitude and creation, then, brings strong men to his end: a wild creature caged in
the ties of his own creation. Men corralled like a killing bull in the darkness of his own

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greatness. “You higher men, the worst about you is that all of you have not learned to
dance as one must dance –dancing away over yourselves! What does it matter that you
are failures? How much is still possible so learn to laugh away over yourselves! Lift up
your hearts, you good dancers, high, higher (…) you higher men, learn to laugh” (Thus
Spoke Zarathustra: 408-9).
Once men had learned to laugh and to carry with the secure its strength had given,
“this autonomous, more than moral individual (…) has developed his own, independent,
long range will (…). This fully emancipated man, master of his will, who dares to make
promises, “possesses (his own) scale of values (that) surely he will call it his conscience”
(Genealogy of Morals: 191-2). What would be Mosquera’s rupture with his moral? The
Devil was supposed to be his anti-moral but I found him dealing with Lucifer, at least in
the stories of Purace. In spite of his family’s official story, Manuel lost his soul, and even
his body, as the indigenous told me. “His body disappeared from the coffin the night after
he died. When some of his close friends opened the coffin to see him by last time, the
only thing they found were many yellow sulfuric stones”. No body, no soul, nothing but
his memory and greatness flying around, far from his old moral of salvation.
But Mosquera had lost his soul before then. His greatness was mounted over the
indigenous’ backs that carried sulfur for years, over the souls of the dead men that were
killed during the different explosions in which the company took no cares to avoid. No
moral was capable to stop any commandment. Mosquera stole, killed and did not feel any
pain or guilt because his moral buffer zone did not exist any more.
IV CONCILIATION BETWEEN WEAK AND STRONG MEN
Conciliation between weak and strong men in Nietzsche is developed here on the basis of
human nature as the meeting between good and evil. Both dance happily in man's mind.
Human lives are crowded with little people like the pristine Christians, and also with
criminals like the condemned boys at Rilker's Island. Humans admire, and many times
want to be, part of that famous strong man in the same way as we glorify them and see
them from their outside. Sometimes men are part of the “mob” and other times they just
escape from it. Men don’t escape from weakness as often as they would like and strength
is an alternative.

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 When I think if Nietzsche would have preferred the boys from the island, or the
decrepit and maleficent Mosquera, or Conrad’s Kutz to the normal citizens of today’s
New York, or the indigenous of Purace, I seriously think that he did not have any
preference for one over the other. His sight was directed toward exploring both
conditions, and looking at them isolated and independent one from the other.
Nietzsche clearly criticized our weakness and what he tried to push was our
awakening so we could lead to creation. For him weakness and strength, were permanent
in all human lives. His creators, his amazing “higher men” and “overman” were
disgusting servants of their strength but they were beautifully exemplified as the way of
fighting Christian morality. His overman was no other than a tale to show man how to
escape from moral and from the old ties of the old power. Niezsche’s intentions were
founded in the need for developing the men of the future. His overman was a need at the
beginning of a century in which nations and people would be closer than before.
Christian morality could not survive as totalistic as it used to be before the XIX century.
To fight morality then was a need of a West that was starting to open.
When I started our exploration of Nietzsche’s world there was always some worry
present in each line I read. Is this philosopher trying to convince me that murdering
humans is a good action in order to break with the moral that makes me weak? If I would
take it in literal sense, it is true that murdering help me to break moral but, as Nietzsche
claims, “it doesn’t justify life” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: 150). Criminal actions don’t
justify life for anyone out of the killer’s mind. Greatness inherited by killing is justifiable
just for the killer. In this sense I don’t think Nietzsche would have preferred the boys
from Rilker's Island to our pacific citizens. He would admire them as human beings of
original thinking and actions but he would find that their greatness does not give them
freedom.

In the case of the indigenous and the man of the mine, he would have thought clearly that
both characters need each other to justify their own existence. In this case strength is in
doubt. And in the metaphoric narration that is why the indigenous were the ones that
carried the coffin of Mosquera to his grave.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. In Morton Dauwen Zabel (editor), 1975: The
Portable Conrad. The Viking Press. New York
- Nietzsche, Firedrich: The Antichrist. In Walter Kauffmann (editor). 1976. The
Portable Nietzsche.
- Nietzsche, Firedrich: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In Walter Kauffmann (editor). 1976.
The Portable Nietzsche.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich.1956. The Birth of Tragedy and Genealogy of Morals
(Translated by Francis Golffing). Anchor books. New York

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